A video recording from just before Christmas Day 2018, shows Sheikh Younus Kathrada telling congregants of the Muslim Youth of Victoria, B.C., that wishing people a Merry Christmas is worse than murder. (Still images from video/via MEMRI.org) For a Licia Corbella column.

Two days before Christmas, the website MEMRI.org featured a disturbing video of a Canadian Muslim cleric saying dangerous, hateful things. To date, it has not received any mainstream media coverage in Canada.

That should alarm us.

Sheikh Younus Kathrada is shown telling congregants of the Muslim Youth of Victoria, B.C., that wishing people a Merry Christmas is worse than murder.

“If a person were to commit every major sin . . . murder, committing adultery, dealing with interest . . . all of these sins, if a person were to do all of those major sins, they are nothing compared to the sin of congratulating and greeting the non-Muslims on their false festivals,” said Kathrada, whose Facebook page has 11,543 followers.

That’s right. This so-called Islamic scholar is telling children it’s better to kill your neighbours than wish them a Merry Christmas!

Kathrada did temper his comments by saying: “This doesn’t mean that we treat the non-Muslims in a bad way or that we deal with them unjustly. I’m not saying, and I’ve never said, ‘go out and just kill them,’ . . . no! Because Allah tells us not to allow the enmity that may exist between you and a people to cause you to be unjust toward them. Rather, be just.”

But in an age when the radicalization of Muslim youth is a problem around the world, including in Canada, for Kathrada to tell a group of youth it is a lesser sin for a Muslim to murder their neighbour than attend their Christmas open house is perilous.

As troubling as his remarks are, what’s just as unnerving is, according to my online searches, no mainstream media agency — not even in Victoria where this sermon was delivered — reported on Kathrada’s hateful message. It’s possible they never were alerted to it, but I find that difficult to believe, since his comments created a firestorm on Twitter, with many cheeky Canadians wishing him a Merry Christmas on his Facebook page — comments that have since been removed.

Imagine for a moment if a priest, pastor or rabbi said to their congregants that wishing a Muslim well during Ramadan or for Eid is worse than murder. It would be on every front page and lead every newscast. Its speaker would be driven underground, camera crews would camp out on their front lawn, Canadians would demand the “government do something.”

When called at his home in Victoria on Thursday, a woman who answered the phone hung up without passing the phone to the controversial cleric.

On the video, he also said, “do you know that you and I must be offended when people say that they worship Jesus, or when they say that Jesus is the Son of God?”

“There are those who will say to them, ‘Merry Christmas.’ What are you congratulating them on? Congratulations on the birth of your Lord? Is that acceptable to a Muslim? Are you now approving of their beliefs?” he asked.

Our next door neighbours are Muslims. They are truly lovely people who not only robustly wish us a Merry Christmas every year, but they give us gifts as well. They represent the vast majority of Muslims, but as countless terrorist attacks show, it only takes one, two or, in the case of 9-11, nine radicalized Islamists to bring down buildings and murder thousands.

This is not the first time Kathrada has said controversial things. In October 2016 he was denounced for other sermons he posted online, where he referred to Jews as “the brothers of the monkeys and the swine,” and said the Prophet tells them, “Oh Muslim, Oh slave of Allah, that verily behind me is a Jew. Then come and kill him.”

The RCMP are investigating him for those earlier comments. Clearly he is not cowed by the lengthy probe. Vancouver Island RCMP did not respond to Postmedia’s calls about the status of the investigation.

We know the radicalization of Muslim youth is a problem all around the world, including here in Calgary, so why the silence on this?

Damian Clairmont, Salman Ashrafi,Farah Shirdon and brothers Collin and Gregory Gordon attended prayers at the since-closed 8th and 8th S.W. Musallah mosque before joining ISIS in Syria and Iraq — a group so violent even some factions of al-Qaida (the masterminds behind 9/11) condemn it. Two other young men, Tamim Chowdhury and Ahmad Waseem, also had ties to the Calgary group before leaving Canada to join ISIS. All are believed to be dead.

The 8th and 8th mosque was affiliated with Muslims in Calgary, the self-described umbrella organization for Sunni Muslims in Calgary, that has brought in controversial speakers in the past, including Bilal Philips, a Toronto imam who says all male homosexuals should face the “punishment for deviant behaviour . . . which is death.”

Philips later clarified that such death sentences should only occur in Muslim countries (and, sadly, they do). Kathrada also contributes to the Muslims in Calgary website, which is no stranger to controversy either for posting anti-Semitic and hateful commentary against non-Muslims.

But the question still remains: Why the media silence? Is this an example of political correctness, is it fear of being targeted by violent Islamists, or are Canadians afraid of being labelled as intolerant even as they point out outrageous intolerance?

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